You can take my review with a grain of salt: everyone else loves this book. Swisher has been reporting on advances in technology since the first personal computers hit the market. She has spent considerable time with Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. She predicted that everything, everywhere, would be digitized, and then monetized. Burn Book is a history of the PC, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Google, and so on. She also reminds us of all the epic failures. Anyone recall My Space? Netscape? Vonage? Are Snapchat and Twitter going to be around a lot longer?
The point of her book seems to be to make sure that readers are fully aware that all the tech bros are awkward, juvenile, and male. She also wants us to know that she is, and always has been, smarter than all of them. The one distinction seems to be that she knows she is arrogant and condescending, unlike most of her subjects. It is a little bit fun to relive the ups and downs of tech throughout our lifetime, but Swisher doesn’t offer any insight. So who cares if she tells us how smart she is and how socially inept the bros are?
This is Annie Jacobsen’s first book in a series of investigative journalism pieces into top-secret practices of the U.S. government. Using the Freedom of Information Act, access to unclassified documents, and interviews with old-timers willing to talk on the record, Jacobsen does her best to describe goings-on at Area 51. Located in the Nevada desert, its existence is not acknowledged by the government nor is it located on maps. It is adjacent to Nevada’s nuclear testing sites, but entrance by land or air is only permitted to those with top level security clearances.
According to Jacobsen, Area 51 was created soon after the Manhattan Project at the end of WW II. It has been used by the CIA, the Air Force, and other military operations. Nuclear weapons have been developed and tested. Spy aircraft like the U-2, Stealth airplanes that could avoid radar, drones, and planes capable of flying faster than Mach 3 were part of Cold War competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. They were operational for decades before the public came to know of them and have been in use in conflict zones around the world. Radiation tests were probably performed on human subjects without their consent to determine the impact of nuclear fallout and the use of dirty bombs.
Jacobsen, strongly implies, that far more nefarious activities have been undertaken–actions so uncomfortable that they are protected against Freedom of Information inquiries. Some secret actions were so clandestine they were kept from Presidents. Jacobsen makes you wonder about the power of democracies to administer their militaries. She also makes you ponder what secret tests are underway today, tests we won’t know about for decades.
Tim Alberta is a Christian evangelical and an accomplished journalist describing what he sees as a growing division inside America’s evangelical churches. He visits and describes events within congregations of numerous mega-churches across the country. A vocal minority (he describes them as a minority, but I’m not sure anyone is counting) of right-wing nationalists have transferred their faith from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump. They are led by like-minded Republicans and by pastors praying for their presidential protector of beleaguered and oppressed Christians in America.
Alberta does not challenge evangelism’s core conservative principles: opposition to abortion, anti-LGBQTIA+ sentiments, Christianity’s promise of a heavenly Kingdom to come, and the necessity of bringing the word of Christ to unbelievers. But he is unstinting in his questioning of how personal conservative beliefs have become militant rallying cries that, in his words, violate the spirit of Christ.
Yet he wonders, how have Christ’s teachings to love your enemies, to welcome the stranger, and to care for the downtrodden turned into a winner-take-all political battle? Why have evangelicals been among the country’s leaders in turning away immigrants, trolling public health advocates promoting Covid vaccines, and on the front lines of the January 6th uprising?
Enthusiastic supporters greet Donald Trump at a rally of more than 30,000 in Mobile, Ala., in August.
The book suggests that the problem is misguided spirituality and he does his best to quote scripture back at those he perceives to be fanatics. But he also describes a movement that is constructed to absorb what it is told on faith. So when congregants get all of their information from charismatic preachers and an endless supply of right-wing, and deeply conspiratorial news sources — Covid was created by cabals to control churches; elections are fixed by “woke” Democrats and the Deep State — there is not much congregational initiative to question.
Alberta points an enraged finger at the Falwells, the Moral Majority, Liberty University, The Southern Baptist Convention, scores of preachers who have sexually abused their congregants, and hucksters who raised millions of dollars preaching hatred to evangelicals terrified that they are losing their God-anointed Christian country.
Near the end of his book, he does his best to point to a resurgence of what he considers sane-minded evangelical Christians. He predicts a forthcoming split of nationalistic churches from those who are Jesus-centered. A schism is the most optimistic outcome he can point to.
In the 1760s, a court case in England suggested that any person of African descent living in Great Britain was a free man. Enslaved Africans in America knew about the court ruling. Moreover, they were well aware that Jefferson’s paragraph in the Declaration of Independence had been deleted. Jefferson, though a slave-owner himself, recognized that the hypocrisy of a declaration calling for freedom, equality, and the removal of the tyranny by unjust overseers could not be squared with the maintenance of American slavery. The Declaration of Independence would not be ratified by southern states so long as Jefferson’s paragraph endured and the issue of slavery was postponed until a later date.
Nonetheless, enslaved Blacks reasoned that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. By the thousands, African Americans fled to British lines, and many Blacks fought against Americans. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of all enslaved Africans escaped plantations, only to find they had backed the losing side.
After the war, as southerners sought to reclaim their lost “property,” Blacks did their utmost to make their way to Great Britain. Three thousand Blacks, for example, were in New York City at war’s end, under the protection of British troops.
Thousands of Blacks moved to Nova Scotia, because it was part of Great Britain. (Check out the link, Our History-Black Migration in Nova Scotia.) They were promised land, but promises were broken. In 1792, 1,192 men, women, and children sailed out of Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone to start a free Black nation on the African shores from which many families had begun their journey. In one poignant early election in Sierra Leone, community representatives were voted on by men and women of the newfound village. Which means the first women in history to ever vote were formerly enslaved Africans.
Kerry Howley digs deep into the lives of American whistleblowers: John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, and Edward Snowden. Each was charged with violating national security laws and faced the full force of an American law enforcement system designed to shut down all security risks. Howley argues that the laws were established hastily while the dust was still smoldering at the World Trade Center. The laws have enabled waterboarding, torture, secret detention camps, Guantanamo, solitary confinement, psychological torment, and imprisonment without representation or trial. They also permit America’s spy agencies to track our phone calls. Agreements we’ve made with Facebook and Google, for example, mean we have traded away a good deal of our privacy. Online collectors gather our interests and our visitations in order to promote the next advertisement to appear in our feed: someone is making a profit by monetizing us.
On one side of the argument the world is a dangerous place. Non-state actors and secretive emissaries of hostile governments are working around the clock to destabilize America. Only constant and unrelenting vigilance can protect us. On the other side, argues Howley, at least some of the Americans she highlights were neither malicious nor dangerous. Their treatment by the American government is very far from upholding America’s values.
Burkhard Bilger is a German-American, accomplished author and writer for the New Yorker, and the right age to have a grandfather who was a Nazi. His grandfather was old enough during the war not to be a soldier, so during the war Nazi officials placed him in charge of an occupied French town in Alsace. After the war, Grandpa was imprisoned for war crimes and then released after being acquitted in trial. Burkhard digs deep in hopes of learning how much of a Nazi his grandfather really was.
What Fatherland does best is contextualize the actions of individuals. He explains why his grandfather joined the Nazi party. It was expedient, but not a requirement. The book describes the daily interactions taking place between the Nazi-emplaced Mayor (Grandpa) and citizens in an occupied French village. Business proceeds, but eyes and ears are everywhere. Negotiations can be verbal, tactical, or violent and Bilger’s Grandfather had to navigate between Nazi orders from above and an innate sense of humanity (atypical of many Nazis.)
Without making excuses for any Nazi behaviors or policies, Burkhard Bilger asks whether there might be a dividing line between horrible Nazis and really-not-so-bad-Nazis. It is a well asked question.
Just as every year is now the hottest on record, so too the number and intensity of wildfires across the planet break annual records for temperature, acreage burned, and never-before-seen fire behavior. A warming climate, low atmospheric humidity, pre-dried forests, and human habitations in previously uninhabited ecosystems are all tinder waiting for an inevitable spark.
What makes this book so insightful is its focus on fires in 2016 that demolished the city of Fort McMurry in Alberta, Canada. Fort McMurry is the home to Canada’s bitumen deposits of tar sands, the worlds least efficient and, after coal, most carbon intensive fuel. In essence, the oil extraction industry warmed the planet enough that it set itself afire.
Further, human habitations, now interspersed in forested and tree-lined communities everywhere, are constructed with fuel for fires. House fires can be contained if a single home goes up, but are uncontrollable when a wall of intense heat flows toward a neighborhood. Homes are fabricated with kiln-dried wood and filled with wooden furniture and cabinetry. The number of household items made of oil-based synthetic products is surprising: vinyl siding, carpets, sofas, pillows, clothing, electronics. To a raging fire, it is all just fuel. Then add the propane tank for the outdoor grill, the gas tank for the SUV, and cans of sprays and paints in the basement and homes tend to explode before a fire even reaches them.
Interspersed with the minute by minute account of the explosive growth of the Fort McMurry fire is a detailed, and unequivocal litany of warning about human induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The evidence and scientific proof has been around for more than 100 years, albeit in some marginal locations. Still, by the 1950s and definitely by the 1980s, there was widespread agreement that burning fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. I was explaining this in lectures already in 1987.
What kind of evil is embodied in corporations and individuals whose internal memos acknowledge the repercussions continued fossil fuel extraction would have on the livability of our planet? Favoring profit or people, Vaillant leaves no doubt that they paid obfuscators to confuse the public and protect their profits.
This book, a National Book Award finalist, should be required reading, but it should also be read only on the first floor. At the end when the reader jumps out the window she can live to recommend the book to someone else.
Lea Ypi is now a distinguished professor of political theory at the London School of Economics. She wanted to describe for readers what life in her native Albania, the last “purely” communist country aside from North Korea, was like prior to its conversion to a more democratic society. Ypi (pronounced Ooopie) begins each chapter with a vignette from her childhood and finishes each with an analysis of political forces at stake. We learn the rules of queuing for rationed commodities; the artistic and status value of owning a smuggled coke can; how the tensions of career paths assigned by the state, rather than chosen, wore down her parents’ marriage; and how something called an unalterable “biography” was deterministic for navigating society.
It is not clear why each story has to be seen through the eyes of young girl, but I think Ypi is doing more than personalizing her experience for readers. She is writing more than a memoir. What she is saying, is that when the State decides what you can do for a living, what you can purchase in a store, or where you can live it infantilizes all of its citizens.
For much of the book, Ypi overlooks heinous actions of Albania’s secret police. That overshadowing is made up for by her critique of capitalism. Albanians were not paralyzed by too much choice, never had to face the difficulty of desiring more than they needed, so no one, she claims, ever really felt poor. Health care and education were available to all. In fact, societal divisions caused by class, sex, or race were theoretically abolished by the communist state. By comparison the inequality meted out by the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of capitalism feels hopelessly unjust. The rich get richer and the poor seem never to break free.
In the end, Ypi’s comparison of Marxism and capitalism criticizes both systems. Under Marxism, man dominates his fellow man. Under capitalism, it’s the other way around.
There is a part of the dry flatlands of Colorado called the San Luis Valley where five acres of land can be purchased for a couple of thousand dollars. There is no electrical grid, sewerage, and in most places no running water. Nevertheless, the appeal of owning one’s own land acts as an outdoor lamp to moths for Americans who are poor, drug-addicted, paroled, angry, deeply religious, paranoid, anti-government conspiracists, or mentally unstable in complicated ways. Ted Conover is an immersion journalist who purchases a piece of property and a trailer and braves the ferocious dogs that seem to surround each shack or trailer and makes an effort to talk to his neighbors.
At his best, Conover humanizes a cadre of people who have stepped outside the normal confines of civilization. We learn that there is a great deal of pain, destitution, and untreated mental disease in an otherwise prosperous country. What he does less well is research and history. He tried to explain how real estate developers came to own the land they are selling, but I still don’t get it. He has part of a chapter about murders that have happened in the area for the last 100 years, but I’m not sure why we should care. Most troubling is the absence of any real arc to his story or take away message. Conover goes back and forth from his east coast university job to his trailer in Colorado and records interviews, but there isn’t any evident beginning, middle, or end to the book.
To his credit, Conover is bringing to light how challenging life can be in America, but the frustrations and misery of the off-gridders doesn’t seem especially unique to Colorado. His subjects can be found just as readily in Philadelphia, Sacramento, or probably within ten blocks of his job at NYU.
It is an enormous undertaking to try and explain the people, cultures, and kaleidoscopic national identities of a region as large as Eastern Europe. Jacob Mikanowski does as good a job as one person can do in a single volume. Beginning in prehistory, Mikanowski really settles in with the establishments of the overlapping and interdigitated religions of the region: pagans, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. For centuries communities and traditions have often lived alongside one another united by common languages while empires have redefined their borders.
The Austro-Hungarians, the Hapsburgs, the Soviets, Poles, Yugoslavians, and Prussians in various iterations and sizes have laid claim to Roma settlements, shtetls, Byzantine churchyards, and people who might speak Ukrainian, a dialect of Hungarian, Yiddish, or who think of themselves as Albanian Muslims, Montenegrans, Latvians, Croats, or Romanians, but in any given century find themselves living in a country not the same as the one their parents or grandparents knew.
In most parts of Eastern Europe, regions and cultures have not undergone the historical nation-making impositions claimed by Western Europe that made countries like Germany, France, and Spain what they are. (That being said, tribal fractionation is still alive and divisive in Great Britain, Belgium, Catalonia, Basque country, and so on.) This history of an enormous region is at once comprehensive and necessarily superficial, focusing on geopolitical machinations and the lives of men. Women and the daily lives of peasants are largely absent, because to include them would be another book, another volume. Still, having a spotlight swept around Eastern Europe is exceptionally informative.
